World of Wong Kar Wai

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cowboydan
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Re: World of Wong Kar Wai

#901 Post by cowboydan » Fri Apr 16, 2021 5:13 am

MichaelB wrote:
Fri Apr 16, 2021 4:36 am
Conversely, I'm looking forward to the new Fallen Angels perhaps more than anything else in this set.

(I have the old Kino BD, so it's not as though I can't turn the clock back any time I want.)
What type of screen are you planning to watch it on? I might imagine that if you projected it to like 75" and sat 8 feet away, the movements would be pretty jarring. My personal flat panel is only 55", but it should still be.... interesting at least.

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Number Forty-Eight
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Re: World of Wong Kar Wai

#902 Post by Number Forty-Eight » Fri Apr 16, 2021 10:51 am

Maybe WKW had a 2001 experience type of thing in mind when it came to reformating this movie? Something sensory?

nostaljhia
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Re: World of Wong Kar Wai

#903 Post by nostaljhia » Fri Apr 16, 2021 11:18 am

What gets me about the whole "we never step in the same river twice" and "you can't recapture the past" thing is that, doesn't that contradict the justification Wong gives for every revision? If it's true that we never step in the same river twice, then why bother changing the films in order to try and restore your "original vision" from 20 years ago?

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Number Forty-Eight
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Re: World of Wong Kar Wai

#904 Post by Number Forty-Eight » Fri Apr 16, 2021 2:22 pm

Napoleon by Abel Gance.

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Mr Sausage
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Re: World of Wong Kar Wai

#905 Post by Mr Sausage » Fri Apr 16, 2021 2:32 pm

nostaljhia wrote:What gets me about the whole "we never step in the same river twice" and "you can't recapture the past" thing is that, doesn't that contradict the justification Wong gives for every revision? If it's true that we never step in the same river twice, then why bother changing the films in order to try and restore your "original vision" from 20 years ago?
What’s the contradiction exactly?

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domino harvey
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Re: World of Wong Kar Wai

#906 Post by domino harvey » Fri Apr 16, 2021 2:54 pm

If the goal is to bring one to the river of the past, it's as impossible as the river of present or future. Thus, just leave the snapshot of the one particular river alone

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senseabove
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Re: World of Wong Kar Wai

#907 Post by senseabove » Fri Apr 16, 2021 3:06 pm

Or a little less abstractly: if my experience of a film is inherently singular and my recollection of the experience and the film is inherently flawed, tainted by time, so is WKW's recollection of his intent.

cowboydan
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Re: World of Wong Kar Wai

#908 Post by cowboydan » Fri Apr 16, 2021 3:35 pm

Another contradiction being: On one hand he said the river metaphor reminded him to "treat these restorations as an opportunity to present new works, from a different vantage point of [his] career." that he invites the audiences to join him in "starting afresh". But on the other hand he said that he changed Fallen Angels to Cinemascope AR because "it was originally what [he] had intended to release the film in" but he couldn't do it at the time because he couldn't get an anamorphic camera.

Thus, he's saying that he wants a new, fresh start from the perspective of his current career. But also, he wants to go back to the old way that he originally envisioned. It's an oxymoron.

I know that people have already made the easy comparison to George Lucas, but it really accurate in my opinion. He's saying that the new revisions bring the films into a state that he would have made them to be back in the 90's if he had the technology to do so.

edit: Another WKW - George Lucas similarity. In Star Wars, Luke kisses his sister Leia. In As Tears Go By, Wah falls in love with his cousin Ngor and makes out with her.

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Re: World of Wong Kar Wai

#909 Post by yoshimori » Fri Apr 16, 2021 4:33 pm

senseabove wrote:
Fri Apr 16, 2021 3:06 pm
Or a little less abstractly: if my experience of a film is inherently singular and my recollection of the experience and the film is inherently flawed, tainted by time, so is WKW's recollection of his intent.
Don't see how any of that makes this project illegitimate or in any way self-contradictory. It is what it is - a second (third) take on the films. Some of the 'revisioning' ideas are new ... and some, old but previously un-realized. How is that a problem? Or even ironic?

There are innumerable examples, as has been raised in this thread multiple times, of such re-visiting of artworks, mostly, I think, for the good. [See Bruckner 3, Bruckner 4, etc. Indeed, every time I buy a new recording of a piece of classical music, I get a new 'take' on it - and that's a big part of the fun of that kind of art.] Dismissing these versions a prioiri seems a strange position to stake out, both on the level of personal-viewing-enjoyment and also from an academico-historical perspective. Or do we not even want to see what Wong is thinking about the works now?

Yes, there are individual shots in the new FA I find cheesy and even antithetical to what I feel is the underlying impulse of the project, but, boy, there's also a lot of successful new ideation here. So sure, the original versions need to be (and I'm pretty sure always will be) available, and sure, hate the new films if you hate them, but to complain that they even exist ...?

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Mr Sausage
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World of Wong Kar Wai

#910 Post by Mr Sausage » Fri Apr 16, 2021 4:37 pm

“cowboydan” wrote: Thus, he's saying that he wants a new, fresh start from the perspective of his current career. But also, he wants to go back to the old way that he originally envisioned. It's an oxymoron.

It’s only a contradiction if you think the first declaration is absolutist. Otherwise, in general he is changing the films to fit his current sensibility, but in some instances is making changes he wished he’d done in the past. There’s nothing mutually exclusive here. Unless for a specific change he claimed one thing and then later claimed another, which he could’ve done and I missed it.
“senseabove” wrote: Or a little less abstractly: if my experience of a film is inherently singular and my recollection of the experience and the film is inherently flawed, tainted by time, so is WKW's recollection of his intent.
This is a false equivalence, no? One’s a factual recollection, the other’s a recollection of an object through one’s experiential and emotional relationship with it.

I don’t like the changes Wong made, they seem bad, but I don’t feel a need to use that to attack the very philosophy of revising past work. That would be short sighted.

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Re: World of Wong Kar Wai

#911 Post by Michael Kerpan » Fri Apr 16, 2021 5:36 pm

Well, nothing WKW has done is comparable to Kingugasa completely destroying the original version of the newly-rediscovered, long lost Kurutta Ippēji (Page of Madness). He used the negative (and only existing source) to radically re-edit the film and then threw out the "scraps". (The original film was apparently not as avant-garde as legend had made it, so Kinugasa "printed the legend" and eradicated the reality). Mind you -- he had the "right" to do this. But it still was an artistic atrocity.

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Mr Sausage
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Re: World of Wong Kar Wai

#912 Post by Mr Sausage » Fri Apr 16, 2021 6:05 pm

Then think of all the artists who destroyed their own works before they could be seen, like Gogol burning the second part of Dead Souls. And how terrible if Max Brod had actually listened to Kafka.

They’re in their right, too, but what an inestimable loss.

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feihong
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Re: World of Wong Kar Wai

#913 Post by feihong » Fri Apr 16, 2021 6:49 pm

Eileen Chang wanted her then-unpublished novel, Little Reunions, destroyed, and told her literary executors that. They waited to see if she would ask them to destroy it again, and since she never did, it was ultimately posthumously published.

And Little Reunions turned out to be one of her greatest books, and most importantly, filled with barely-disguised autobiography––giving us a much broader perspective on Chang's life than did The Fall of the Pagoda or The Book of Change, which are more fixated on specific eras of her life.

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senseabove
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Re: World of Wong Kar Wai

#914 Post by senseabove » Sat Apr 17, 2021 5:00 am

Mr Sausage wrote:
Fri Apr 16, 2021 4:37 pm
This is a false equivalence, no? One’s a factual recollection, the other’s a recollection of an object through one’s experiential and emotional relationship with it.

I don’t like the changes Wong made, they seem bad, but I don’t feel a need to use that to attack the very philosophy of revising past work. That would be short sighted.
Caveat that this was nostaljhia's argument, I was just paraphrasing what I thought they meant. But I'll give it a go:

If I'm understanding what you mean—that Wong's recollection is factual and the viewer's isn't?—I don't think I agree that it's a false equivalence. I'm definitely not inclined to agree that any artist has an accurate and untainted impression of their intent from 20 years before (or that intent as it functions in the relationship between formal, intellectual, and emotional content in art can be easily reduced to anything "factual," but that's a can of worms we'll keep closed for now). Ask me about my teenage poetry of twenty years ago and maybe I can tell you that I peppered it with Latin phrases because I was in Latin II at the time and that I wrote some particular poem after mom grounded me for a month because I came home late on a school night... but can I tell you irrefutably why I chose to break a line there or chose one word over its synonym? (Could I even tell you then?)

Does Wong have a more interesting and insightful conception of his intent at the time than a random viewer? Sure. But given Wong's well-known penchant for revising, I don't have the impression he sets out with an exacting and precise vision that need only be accurately reproduced on celluloid. He's no Hitchcock, as the many, many (relatively) minor variations attest. Yet he specifically cites a discrepancy between how "the audience remembered them" and "how I originally envisioned them," and that "these are not the same films." So for him to argue that we can't recapture the past but also that he's accurately recapturing something of his past intent does strike me as at least a little incongruent.

And I don't see that argument as disallowing revisionism (or, per yoshimori, being angry that these revisions exist), just that it undermines Wong's justification for these revisions' supremacy; and even then it isn't the revision that I and other folks are irritated by, but the suppression of known versions and the significant alteration of key formal effects that inarguably go beyond the variances of restoration or even what was or wasn't possible at the time. It was entirely possible to desaturate that Fallen Angels shot to B&W in 1995, and yet he didn't, and its fish-eyed greenness was—despite not even liking the movie then!—one of the first notably memorable "shots" of my cinephile life. I've seen ITMFL on film three times, before these restorations were even rumored; that movie was not and never has been green, and if he had wanted to make it green in 2000, he could have.

If Wong decided to make changes now—say, to bring the "Love Trilogy" into more stylistic uniformity, whether that was the original or a much-belated intent—that's a perfectly fine, interesting thing to do, and if even the unrestored versions from previous releases were included, I'm pretty confident this entire conversation would've ended a loooooooooong time ago, and we'd be on to talking about what effects the differences between two versions produce. But Wong is saying "this new version is the best version now," and also "I have decided the version you've known for two decades is fundamentally wrong." If we can't step into the same river twice, can he say the river he stepped out of in 1995 or 2000 is so wrong? Wasn't that as much a product of the limitations, necessities, and choices of that time as the technical capability and perspective he has now?

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Number Forty-Eight
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Re: World of Wong Kar Wai

#915 Post by Number Forty-Eight » Sat Apr 17, 2021 5:46 am

What is Christopher Doyle involvement in those changes? WKW has the spotlight, but I read Doyle was involved. However, any attempt to get anything rational from him in interviews about the remastering, results in him ordering pints of beers and rambling about his life experience. Not that it isn't entertaining, but it looks like no one has been able to get any quote from him about what he did on those films remasters.

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yoloswegmaster
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Re: World of Wong Kar Wai

#916 Post by yoloswegmaster » Sat Apr 17, 2021 6:31 am

Number Forty-Eight wrote:
Sat Apr 17, 2021 5:46 am
What is Christopher Doyle involvement in those changes? WKW has the spotlight, but I read Doyle was involved. However, any attempt to get anything rational from him in interviews about the remastering, results in him ordering pints of beers and rambling about his life experience. Not that it isn't entertaining, but it looks like no one has been able to get any quote from him about what he did on those films remasters.
Ritrovata had confirmed on Facebook that he had approved of the restoration for 'Chungking Express', but they never mentioned if he was involved on the other restorations.

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Mr Sausage
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World of Wong Kar Wai

#917 Post by Mr Sausage » Sat Apr 17, 2021 10:12 am

senseabove wrote:
Mr Sausage wrote:
Fri Apr 16, 2021 4:37 pm
This is a false equivalence, no? One’s a factual recollection, the other’s a recollection of an object through one’s experiential and emotional relationship with it.

I don’t like the changes Wong made, they seem bad, but I don’t feel a need to use that to attack the very philosophy of revising past work. That would be short sighted.
Caveat that this was nostaljhia's argument, I was just paraphrasing what I thought they meant. But I'll give it a go:

If I'm understanding what you mean—that Wong's recollection is factual and the viewer's isn't?—I don't think I agree that it's a false equivalence. I'm definitely not inclined to agree that any artist has an accurate and untainted impression of their intent from 20 years before (or that intent as it functions in the relationship between formal, intellectual, and emotional content in art can be easily reduced to anything "factual," but that's a can of worms we'll keep closed for now). Ask me about my teenage poetry of twenty years ago and maybe I can tell you that I peppered it with Latin phrases because I was in Latin II at the time and that I wrote some particular poem after mom grounded me for a month because I came home late on a school night... but can I tell you irrefutably why I chose to break a line there or chose one word over its synonym? (Could I even tell you then?)

Does Wong have a more interesting and insightful conception of his intent at the time than a random viewer? Sure. But given Wong's well-known penchant for revising, I don't have the impression he sets out with an exacting and precise vision that need only be accurately reproduced on celluloid. He's no Hitchcock, as the many, many (relatively) minor variations attest. Yet he specifically cites a discrepancy between how "the audience remembered them" and "how I originally envisioned them," and that "these are not the same films." So for him to argue that we can't recapture the past but also that he's accurately recapturing something of his past intent does strike me as at least a little incongruent.

And I don't see that argument as disallowing revisionism (or, per yoshimori, being angry that these revisions exist), just that it undermines Wong's justification for these revisions' supremacy; and even then it isn't the revision that I and other folks are irritated by, but the suppression of known versions and the significant alteration of key formal effects that inarguably go beyond the variances of restoration or even what was or wasn't possible at the time. It was entirely possible to desaturate that Fallen Angels shot to B&W in 1995, and yet he didn't, and its fish-eyed greenness was—despite not even liking the movie then!—one of the first notably memorable "shots" of my cinephile life. I've seen ITMFL on film three times, before these restorations were even rumored; that movie was not and never has been green, and if he had wanted to make it green in 2000, he could have.

If Wong decided to make changes now—say, to bring the "Love Trilogy" into more stylistic uniformity, whether that was the original or a much-belated intent—that's a perfectly fine, interesting thing to do, and if even the unrestored versions from previous releases were included, I'm pretty confident this entire conversation would've ended a loooooooooong time ago, and we'd be on to talking about what effects the differences between two versions produce. But Wong is saying "this new version is the best version now," and also "I have decided the version you've known for two decades is fundamentally wrong." If we can't step into the same river twice, can he say the river he stepped out of in 1995 or 2000 is so wrong? Wasn't that as much a product of the limitations, necessities, and choices of that time as the technical capability and perspective he has now?
A. Going back to do something you couldn’t do at the time is not “recapturing”. It’s just capturing.

B. Memories are subject to fault, therefore Wong’s memories of his intent are definitely faulty is not a good argument. Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t. I take your point about Wong’s working methods, tho’.

C. All forms of recollection are not equivalent. See for instance: your recollection of whether or not you wanted to paint your first car a specific colour but couldn’t afford it vs. your recollections of your first love. The nature and qualities of these forms of recollection are quite different.

D. When Wong says all that stuff in his director’s statement, he’s probably projecting. He may even want to recapture the critical and art house popularity he enjoyed in the 90s by in effect creating new films that’ll appeal more to current audiences. Who knows. Ultimately the emotional and artistic bases of this project are deeper and more complex than whatever’s in that director’s statement. Getting a quick own on Wong’s logic is pointless.

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tenia
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Re: World of Wong Kar Wai

#918 Post by tenia » Sat Apr 17, 2021 11:02 am

In a way, it feels like this is now gone quite far away to discuss what simply is a case of revisionism from the director and possibly from the restoration lab on top of that. We certainly can discuss why Wong can do so if he wants to, but it feels like we're now discussing how this might not be revisionism after all or something like this.
In the end, these are what we get : new alternate versions of these movies with no previous versions included in the set. Wong might even simply be doing some kind of marketing schtick with his statement, a way to frame his revisionism in some kind of philosophico-artistic manner, but it won't change the fact the set only contains altered versions and that, yes, they're explicitly altered, and that yes, in some cases, the explanations for the alternations don't look totally convincing.

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Re: World of Wong Kar Wai

#919 Post by kekid » Sat Apr 17, 2021 5:05 pm

He who controls the past controls the future.
He who controls the present controls the past.

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Re: World of Wong Kar Wai

#920 Post by nostaljhia » Sun Apr 18, 2021 1:20 pm

yoshimori wrote:
Fri Apr 16, 2021 4:33 pm
So sure, the original versions need to be (and I'm pretty sure always will be) available, and sure, hate the new films if you hate them, but to complain that they even exist ...?
Mr Sausage wrote:
Sat Apr 17, 2021 10:12 am
ltimately the emotional and artistic bases of this project are deeper and more complex than whatever’s in that director’s statement. Getting a quick own on Wong’s logic is pointless.
Thank you to everyone who thoughtfully responded to/expanded on my admittedly vague post, but I just want to clarify that I didn't mean it to undermine or "get a quick own" on Wong's artistic intent or even complain about the existence of the new versions. Honestly, I like the fact that these new versions exist and can appreciate artists' urge to play with their own work, just not at the expense of the availability of the original versions. And that's the exact problem I have with what I see as a contradiction in Wong's statement: I feel he's presenting these restorations as simultaneously being new approaches and reflections of his original vision. If he had simply embraced them being new versions, as he's asking us to do, maybe he would've been more inclined to include the original versions alongside the new. As it is now there's nothing in their presentation (aside from Wong's statement) that distinguishes them as alternate versions.

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Mr Sausage
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World of Wong Kar Wai

#921 Post by Mr Sausage » Sun Apr 18, 2021 2:35 pm

nostaljhia wrote:I feel he's presenting these restorations as simultaneously being new approaches and reflections of his original vision.
Again, this is only a contradiction if he makes both claims about any given change. Otherwise, some of the changes are things he’d always wanted to do, and some (most?) are things he wants to change now. Either way, they are new versions of the films, whether the intentions on display are new or old, whether this or that film is a mixture of the two or not.

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Re: World of Wong Kar Wai

#922 Post by senseabove » Sun Apr 18, 2021 8:36 pm

And also again, no one would care which is which or whether he is being contradictory if he weren't asserting these are now The Wholly Singular and Only True Versions, despite a well-documented history of production and editing methods—a different cut for every film festival—which indicate that his "original vision" is hardly ever so settled and, more importantly, contradictory evidence within the films themselves in the form of changes that were entirely within the realm of possibility during the original production, as evidenced by their use within the very same film's previous versions.

The problem, and the reason some of us are inclined to nitpick it, is that he is using that assertion as justification for the suppression of widely-known and widely-beloved versions and, furthermore, to bolster an argument that all of us who otherwise don't like it probably just have lying eyes and lying memories. No one disputes his right to cut a new version of every movie he's ever made every month until he dies. But to assert that this new "original vision" is the only version of them that should be available is, at the very least in the case of FA, an objective misrepresentation of film history, even if the new version is an exactingly perfect embodiment of his so-called original vision.

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Re: World of Wong Kar Wai

#923 Post by yoshimori » Sun Apr 18, 2021 9:28 pm

senseabove wrote:
Sun Apr 18, 2021 8:36 pm
But to assert that this new "original vision" is the only version of them that should be available ...
Wait. What? He said that? Then, truly, shame on him.

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Mr Sausage
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Re: World of Wong Kar Wai

#924 Post by Mr Sausage » Sun Apr 18, 2021 9:40 pm

senseabove wrote:
Sun Apr 18, 2021 8:36 pm
And also again, no one would care which is which or whether he is being contradictory if he weren't asserting these are now The Wholly Singular and Only True Versions, despite a well-documented history of production and editing methods—a different cut for every film festival—which indicate that his "original vision" is hardly ever so settled and, more importantly, contradictory evidence within the films themselves in the form of changes that were entirely within the realm of possibility during the original production, as evidenced by their use within the very same film's previous versions.

The problem, and the reason some of us are inclined to nitpick it, is that he is using that assertion as justification for the suppression of widely-known and widely-beloved versions and, furthermore, to bolster an argument that all of us who otherwise don't like it probably just have lying eyes and lying memories. No one disputes his right to cut a new version of every movie he's ever made every month until he dies. But to assert that this new "original vision" is the only version of them that should be available is, at the very least in the case of FA, an objective misrepresentation of film history, even if the new version is an exactingly perfect embodiment of his so-called original vision.
Your post gets so close to the truth, you just don't seem to realize it. Mainly: the nitpicks, the contradiction hunting, the accusations of unethical behaviour, the treatment of a small commercial press release amounting to advertising copy as a manifesto--all this is, yeah, because you're unhappy. You're unhappy you're not getting the original versions. It's all serving an emotional basis. No one likes that Wong is suppressing the release versions, so no one's too careful about the accusations they make, the flaws they dig up, the nits they pick. If the extent of the accusation happens to accord with the extent of the negative emotions, all the better. And when interrogated enough, most of these accusations eventually boil down to the same thing: not getting the originals (always said to you as if you weren't aware, as if it was news to you).

There are plenty of good reasons to dislike what Wong's doing, you'll hear no disagreement from me there. But that doesn't mean any negative claim one cares to make is justified. And there's been a fair bit of nonsense claimed here and there (my favourite was the guy who said this was an affront to the costume department).

And, given the amount of time and space spent on our own members' repeated clarifications of mostly straightforward points here, in this thread, you might imagine that, on being presented with one of these putative contradictions, Wong's own clarifications might prove illuminating. Or not. But at least consider there might be more to it than we're seeing.

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senseabove
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Re: World of Wong Kar Wai

#925 Post by senseabove » Mon Apr 19, 2021 12:05 am

Oh, please. Yes, my opinions about a subject I've been researching graduate degrees in are just an emotional temper tantrum. Thank god I have you to make me "realize" the "truth"! Sometimes I just don't know how I keep my head on!

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